Book news.  We have a new
publication date for Stars Beyond. It’s
22 October 2019. We’re looking
forward to it.

We have also seen the cover, which we can’t show you yet.
Love it.

The completed rewrite of Stars Beyond is due at the end of January.  Sherylyn has her headphones on, listening to the Microsoft Read-Aloud function.

I’m following her edits, accepting or rejecting changes.

We try to read all our books aloud. Reading aloud to each other is good, when you have the time, because you smooth the writing together.  However, even when you do this, you miss some basic issues because you read the words you expect to see, so you don’t always pick up things like missing words.

A total stranger reading aloud will read the words, but we read what we expect to see. That’s why it was so great when Mum was with us. She read each word.

The read-aloud function in Word reads each word, and it reads it in a monotone. It picks up things we don’t see.

Sherylyn’s been listening for three full days now. It’s a big job, but important. She’s found a lot of missing commas, commas that should have been full stops, typos (if the reader can’t understand the name, it spells it out, which is a definite indicator there’s a typo) and just jerky words in general.

She’s also picking up lots of missing words, repeated words
and awkward paragraphs.

We’re starting to think about the story we want to work on
next.